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Loews Philadelphia, Commonwealth Hall C
Hosted By:
American Finance Association
reduction in the loan commitment. Quantitatively, the reduction in credit to borrowers with long-term credit but who violate a covenant accounts for a nearly 12\% decline in the volume of loans and commitments outstanding between 2007 and 2009, slightly larger than the total contraction in credit during that period. We conclude that the bank lending channel is largely a loan covenant channel.
Financing Frictions and Their Impact on Liquidity
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 5, 2018 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM
- Chair: Stacey Schreft, U.S. Office of Financial Research
Financial Intermediaries, Corporate Debt Financing, and The Transmission of Systemic Risk
Abstract
We revisit the spillover effects to non-financial, corporate borrowers from a systemic event in which a number of large, important banks simultaneously become imperiled. To shed light on this question, we build a novel, comprehensive dataset, covering both firms’ borrowing activities through bank loans, revolvers, corporate bonds, and commercial paper and the particular institutions to which they are connected. We demonstrate that while there are over one thousand financial institutions active in facilitating the borrowing activity of non-financial firms before the financial crisis, roughly 80% is facilitated by a group of large, central institutions. As many of these central institutions approach the edge of failure during the crisis, we uncover significant cross-sectional variability in the degree to which non-financial firms are affected, depending upon whether and how these firms rely on external debt financing. First, the one-third of firms that (largely) do not rely on external debt financing exhibit limited exposure to the systemic event. Second, for the remaining firms that do rely on external debt financing, the cross-sectional variation in their crisis exposure is mainly driven by measurable pre-crisis connections to the central financial institutions. Further, crisis exposures do not appear to be significantly lower for those firms that exhibit multiple bank connections or have access to the public debt market. The often-hypothesized means of diversifying funding risks appear to be limited in an episode where the central institutions are collectively impaired.The Loan Covenant Channel: How Bank Health Transmits to the Real Economy
Abstract
We document the importance of covenant violations in transmitting bank health to nonfinancial firms using a new supervisory data set of bank loans. More than one-third of loans in our data breach a covenant during the 2008-09 period, providing lenders the opportunity to force a renegotiation of loan terms or to accelerate repayment. We find that lenders in worse health are less likely to grant a waiver and more likely to force areduction in the loan commitment. Quantitatively, the reduction in credit to borrowers with long-term credit but who violate a covenant accounts for a nearly 12\% decline in the volume of loans and commitments outstanding between 2007 and 2009, slightly larger than the total contraction in credit during that period. We conclude that the bank lending channel is largely a loan covenant channel.
Discussant(s)
Phil Dybvig
,
Washington University-St. Louis
Victoria Ivashina
,
Harvard Business School
Sudheer Chava
,
Georgia Institute of Technology
JEL Classifications
- G2 - Financial Institutions and Services